Category: News and Events

Are you a nurse, allied health professional, public health or local government member of staff who is interested in research or who has had some exposure to research? Our workshop is suitable for staff from NHS Trusts, NHS CCGs, and Local Authorities who are keen to become involved in research.

Engaging in research is a great way to address the questions that often arise in health care. It can also play a vital role in producing new evidence and new knowlegde for decision-making to improve health care.

This introductory level course is a first step on the journey towards becoming “research active”, either by developing your own small project or getting involved in other ways e.g. collaborating on research studies, assisting clients / patients in your care to take part in research, being a (critical) research ‘consumer’ or helping to shape research priorities, design and delivery. We ask that participants attend the workshop with a research idea, innovation, or change that they would like to plan for, or collaborate on with researchers.

By the end of the course participants will:

Understand the research process, including the principles behind good research design and planning for dissemination and impact

Understand the different roles within a research team and identify the points at which you can become involved

Be able to apply criteria to judge the potential value and feasibility of a research project idea

Have a basic understanding of research governance and ethics requirements, and know where to find out more

Know how to involve patients and the public in every stage of research, and understand how it could benefit the research

Know how to access relevant resources or the help available across North Thames to design, plan and fund research

This workshop is not aimed at academics and/or researchers.

*e.g. you might have done a Masters level module in collecting and analysing data, or critical appraisal of research, or have helped to support research in your organisation or attended another one of our Academy courses.

All participants will receive a certificate of attendance.

Cost – This course is free for staff working in NIHR CLAHRC North Thames partner organisations (a list of our partners is available on our website). There is a delegate fee of £250 for other attendees.

Are you a nurse, allied health professional, public health or local government member of staff who is interested in research or who has had some exposure to research? Our workshop is suitable for staff from NHS Trusts, NHS CCGs, and Local Authorities who are keen to become involved in research.

Engaging in research is a great way to address the questions that often arise in health care. It can also play a vital role in producing new evidence and new knowlegde for decision-making to improve health care.

This introductory level course is a first step on the journey towards becoming “research active”, either by developing your own small project or getting involved in other ways e.g. collaborating on research studies, assisting clients / patients in your care to take part in research, being a (critical) research ‘consumer’ or helping to shape research priorities, design and delivery. We ask that participants attend the workshop with a research idea, innovation, or change that they would like to plan for, or collaborate on with researchers.

By the end of the course participants will:

Understand the research process, including the principles behind good research design and planning for dissemination and impact

Understand the different roles within a research team and identify the points at which you can become involved

Be able to apply criteria to judge the potential value and feasibility of a research project idea

Have a basic understanding of research governance and ethics requirements, and know where to find out more

Know how to involve patients and the public in every stage of research, and understand how it could benefit the research

Know how to access relevant resources or the help available across North Thames to design, plan and fund research

This workshop is not aimed at academics and/or researchers.

*e.g. you might have done a Masters level module in collecting and analysing data, or critical appraisal of research, or have helped to support research in your organisation or attended another one of our Academy courses.

All participants will receive a certificate of attendance.

Cost – This course is free for staff working in NIHR CLAHRC North Thames partner organisations (a list of our partners is available on our website). There is a delegate fee of £250 for other attendees.

Congratulations were in order for CLAHRC researcher Meredith Hawking after her poster won a prize at the 2018 Annual Scientific Meeting of the Society for Academic Primary Care at the Barbican Centre, London.

Meredith with her winning poster

The prestigious SAPC event brings together researchers and educators from the primary care community in the UK and around the world to showcase their latest studies.

Meredith is based at Queen Mary University of London and her PhD focuses on Investigating patients’ perspectives and adherence to anticoagulants for atrial fibrillation.

Atrial fibrillation is a heart condition affecting a million people in the UK that causes an irregular and often abnormally fast heart rate. AF is associated with 1 in 8 strokes (1 in 3 over 80 years). More than half these strokes could be averted by oral anticoagulants (OAC), but the proportion of patients receiving oral anticoagulants has improved by only 1.5% per year over the last 25 years and was only 50% in 2012.

Meredith’s poster- entitled Adherence to direct oral anticoagulants for non-valvular atrial fibrillation in real world settings: a systematic review and meta-analysis – outlines her work to explore how widespread nonadherenece to anticoagulants is.

As part of a series of blogs from prominent members of the research community CLAHRC Director Professor Rosalind Raine pays tribute to Michael Marmot, who has consistently and eloquently pointed out the unequal distribution of the social determinants of health.

Professor Raine’s piece in the British Medical Journal, the last of a series of”research legends” blogs highlights the ongoing relevance of Marmot’s work in light of the widening health gap between the socially advantaged and disadvantaged.

Describing Professor Marmot as an “iconic figure” Rosalind highlights his drive to keep health inequalities high on the policy agenda, and his impact on the NHS, in particular the 2010 Marmot review examining health inequalities in England.

What is the role of evidence in decisions about introducing or spreading innovations in health care?

Faced with a myriad range of innovations – in technology, medicine, ways of working and in organising services what do those who plan and commission services have to call on?

We know that a range of evidence informs healthcare decision-making, from formal research findings to ‘soft intelligence’ or local data, as well as practical experience or tacit knowledge. However, cultural and organisational factors often prevent the translation of such evidence into practice.

New guidance from the“DEcisions in health Care to Introduce or Diffuse innovations using Evidence” (DECIDE) study has been published to support decision-makers and evaluators in the use of evidence in their work.

A team funded by the Health Foundation and led by researchers at the University of Manchester and University College London has investigated decision-makers’ use of diverse forms of evidence, exploring how and why some evidence does inform decisions to introduce health care innovations, and why barriers persist in other cases. The guidance was developed in consultation with clinicians, health managers, commissioners, patient representatives, and researchers.

The guidance is the end point of two years work involving a review of current evidence; examination of three case studies of real world decision-making on innovations in NHS acute and primary care; and a national survey and discrete choice experiment of decision-makers’ preferences for evidence, including providers and commissioners.

The accessible document – available as an interactive PDF, is aimed at anyone concerned with informing or making decisions about introducing or spreading innovations within the UK National Health Service, including providers and commissioners of care. It provides a summary the team’s findings, questions for decision-makers to consider, and potential ways of addressing them using examples from case studies. The document also sign-post users of this guidance to further resources where appropriate.

Read more from the DECIDE team below –

Turner S. (2018) ‘Accelerating innovation in new ways of delivering health and social care’, Manchester Policy Blog, published 28 March 2018.

Current debates on the NHS workforce include discussions on the best balance between

specialists – with highly specialised skills who are brilliant at doing a small number of things extremely well

and generalists – who can do a wider range of things in less depth

Image courtesy SRG Partnership

Rising multimorbidity, an ageing population, and the increasing specialisation of medical treatment are all seen as driving the need to increase the number of doctors with generalist skills. Generalists breadth of expertise enables them to manage both acute and chronic health problems and have been put forward as the way to provide better care for the increasing numbers of older and more complex patients requiring emergency medical admission.

A team of researchers from University College London and the Nuffield Trust is investigating the models of medical generalism currently in use in smaller acute hospitals in England and need your help.

A brief survey is asking for patient, professional and service perspectives on the balance of care between specialist and generalist models in hospitals for patients with acute medical conditions.

We would be very grateful if you could complete the survey within the next three weeks please, and we would like to encourage you to complete it at your earliest convenience. This will ensure we capture your views on models of care in small hospitals. The survey will take at most 5-10 minutes to complete. All responses will be handled securely, kept strictly confidential and anonymous, and stored in line with the Data Protection Act 1998 and new General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR).

Do you need to demonstrate the economic impact of projects in your organisations?

Do you want to assess the outcomes and sustainability of a new service?

Are you tasked with carrying out an economic evaluation, but don’t know where to start?

This one day, hands-on workshop aims to provide an introduction to addressing these challenges. It is run buy the NIHR CLAHRC North Thames Academy. The course is aimed at staff in frontline services in the NHS and local governement, who have limited experience of conducting economic evaluations and decision making analysis.

After attending this course, you will have the skills and knowledge to undertake your own simple economic evaluation of a local intervention or service, and be able to appraise other evaluations.

The course will cover:

introduce the basic principles of economic evaluation methods

explain how to assess the costs of an intervention/service

explain how to measure and value outcomes of an intervention/service

give practical examples of economic evaluation analysis

help to understand how to use economic evaluation in decision making

offer the opportunity to discuss in small groups the economic evaluation you are doing or thinking of doing. A facilitator will help scope your economic evaluation, draft its core elements, identify the data you will need to use, think how you could overcome information or data gaps,

This worksop is suitable for staff from NHS Trusts, Local Authorities and CCGs who need to evaluate local programmes or service from an economic perspective as part of their work. It is not aimed at academics and/or researchers.

In order to be most beneficial for the participants, we invite applications from individuals who are carrying out or soon will need to carry out an economic evaluation of a service/intervention. In the selection process, we will give priority to applications providing a detailed description of such projects. Groups of people working on the same project are encouraged to apply.

No previous knowledge of economics is required (or experience of study design and statistics), however an interest in economics and being comfortable with numbers is desirable.

All participants will receive a certificate of attendance.

Cost – This course if free for staff working in NIHR CLAHRC North Thames partner organisations (please click here to see a list of our partners). There is a delegate fee of £250 for other attendees.

New CLAHRC research highlights a simple intervention that could improve detection of atrial fibrillation (AF) – a potentially dangerous heart condition affecting a million people in the UK and associated with 1 in 8 strokes (1 in 3 strokes among those aged over 80 years).

East London GP and CLAHRC researcher Dr John Robson led an investigation into the impact of regular pulse checks in general practice on AF detection among patients aged 65 and over. This work, published in the British Journal of General Practice, offers evidence that these checks – a cheap and straightforward intervention – rapidly improved the detection and prevalence of AF, meaning quicker access to treatment and reduced risk of stoke for those diagnosed.

The condition causes an irregular and often abnormally fast heart rate and is a leading cause of stroke – with strokes caused by underlying AF twice as likely to be fatal. AF is common in older people, but often shows no symptoms – meaning earlier detection and access to treatment means reduced risk of stroke and the health problems stroke victims have to live with afterwards.

Dr Robson and his team checked historical GP records to investigate the impact of a programme promoting pulse regularity checks across three groups of East London GP practices (or Clinical Commissioning Groups) – City and Hackney, Newham, and Tower Hamlets.

An analysis of electronic primary care patient records before (2007–2012) and after (2012–2017) checks were introduced showed significant increases in AF detection.